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10/20/2005: another rat post...
My rats are delightful little perverts. I just saw Dustin give himself something that looked a lot like a blowjob while he was grooming. Obviously rats are lucky to be this flexible... I mean, at first I thought he was merely cleaning himself, but when I looked closer I saw that he had both his front paws on his penis and was sort of energetically tugging while he licked it, and did the same tugging/licking thing again a little bit later in his grooming routine, and it definitely looked like he liked it. Then again maybe it's just my mind that's perverted... *grin*
Sadly I didn't have my camera out, so I don't have pictures of my (probably) masturbating pet rat, however I have uploaded a gallery with lots of photos of my rats from throughout the last weeks, so you can see how fast they've been growing up. Obviously having a digital camera as a pet owner results in tons of photographs of dubious quality documenting the pets' life in excruciating detail.
(lots of rambing about my pet rats...)
Overall the two of them have been great, and by now they mostly trust me too, and are both bold enough to come out of the cage and run free during their playtime. Unfortunately my rat-proofing efforts haven't been fully successful. I mean, the room so far has been proven safe enough for my rats when they're supervised, just not from them. In particular they love to chew on the woodchip paper especially near their cage, because it is apparently a lot of fun to dig out the woodchips between the paper layers and tug so that small stripes of paper with paint and wood come down. I mean, I know that rodents chew, and offer them plenty stuff and toys in and outside the cage they could use for that without problem (branches, ropes, rags, paper and cardboard, some special rodent chewing stone, rodent chewtoys from pressed herbs, and obviously hard rodent food...), but apparently nothing was a fun as the wallpaper. I've mostly discouraged them by putting large (and "boring") normal paper sheets over the wallpaper around the cage, so at least they won't bring don't even larger sections -- a mere few moments after they discovered that fun was enough to destroy an area of wallpaper equal to my palm before I managed to stop them. Another problem is that Ben is a true adventurer and explorer along the Star Trek spirit of going where no rat has gone before, and somehow manages to get over, under, behind, and inside things that I thought I had rendered inaccessible. Not to mention that he can be incredibly hyper sometimes. *sigh*
Fortunately they are quite lazy and most of the time, Dustin more than Ben, though, and while they love to get out of the cage, they often just prefer to sleep on top of it of some rags I put there after they started to sleep on the metal bars -- they like it better with the cloth though. ;) I mean, at the same time I worry whether I'm really dedicated enough as their human to provide them mental stimulation, and whether I shouldn't encourage them more to be active outside. So far I've mostly just offered that they can come out while I'm there, and provided additional interesting things for them in the room, like branches for climbing, some tubes, a sandbox for digging, and obviously they can explore most of the room itself. OTOH those times my rats do decide to play, it's very exhausting to keep up with them, as they seem most interested in things not particularly safe for them (like climbing on wobbly CD racks that were never meant to be safe for energetic rat play). and I also have to monitor their surprising destructive potential, since I can only remove or bar so much, considering their determined paws and teeth. My last rats (who were female) mostly played with each other (e.g. they chased each other in something like a game of catch a lot) and did little to my stuff and furniture, but these two just scuffle sometimes, and the rest of the time they prefer to "play" with things.
Another minor frustration is that every single time Dustin comes to me he feels the need to piss on me. Not a lot, just a few tiny drops to mark me, and I know that it's normal that male rats in particular do that to things (and people), but Ben does it only rarely on me, I guess because he's not the dominant. It's not that I find it extremely gross, their urine doesn't smell much worse than the rats themselves, and it's not more intense than say human sweat, but well, it's still wet, and it's piss, and a nuisance. I tried convincing him that I'm above him in the social order by trying to recreate something like their dominance scuffles, i.e. turning him of his back doing a sort of grooming etc. in the hopes that it might help, and he'd become more like Ben in his scent marking habits, but no luck so far. Also, being of such a different size and strength I find it rather difficult to emulate these scuffles successfully, so I'm not entirely sure how well I manage to convey my ideas of my social standing to them. Anyway, I wish Dustin would at least limit himself to "marking" me once, but even when I don't bother washing myself during their playtime and just dry my hand or arm with a paper towel, he'll still piss on me every time he climbs on my hand, arm or shoulder, which I just don't appreciate in the proper rat-like fashion like he probably thinks I should.
